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Someone I'd thought of as a good friend first encouraged me to embrace what she described as 'The Power of Positive Thinking'. I'd just told her about what I saw as really rather bad news. I had breast cancer.

Her rebuttal of my justification for feeling a bit down in the mouth about it - I would have to undergo surgery and then either radio- or chemotherapy to control or maybe even cure a disease which is generally feared as a killer - was swift and uncompromising. I must not, she told me, have such negative thoughts. It was probably pessimistic thinking which had caused it in the first place. I must now be positive and heal myself.

I dismissed what she was saying as nonsense. No one knows what causes so many of us - around 44,000 a year in the UK alone - to develop this disease, but there were a few strong hints coming out of scientific research.

Top of the list for women like me who'd passed the menopause is an excess of the hormone oestrogen and I had been taking HRT for a few years so I was awash with the stuff. What I must do, she advised, was feel happy - she had read that happiness can cut breast cancer risk by a quarter. I must eliminate all negativity in relationships from my life, stop watching depressing news on TV and begin a programme of 'visualisation' and imagine the white cells in my immune system fighting off all the nasty cancer cells.

This, I assured her, was what I believed was the cause. She then proceeded to regale me with endless pieces of what she claimed to be evidence that her theory was right. She had read lots of books about it. There was Norman Vincent Peale's The Power Of Positive Thinking, Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life, Rhonda Byrne's The Secret and Colin Ryder Richardson's Mind Over Cancer.